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Tag: Transportation

One defining characteristic of early economists was their antipathy toward protectionism, because they realized that high tariffs and import restrictions harm a nation’s citizens by eliminating mutual benefits that voluntary exchange would have created. Adam Smith, history’s most famous economist, was among their number. However, there was the one case of protectionism he endorsed,...Read More »

The pro-surveillance state narrative says that 9/11 resulted from U.S. security agencies’ “Failure to connect the dots.” Apparently this “failure” stemmed from there being too few agencies and/or their having too-limited powers, because its “correction” necessitated the creation of the new Department of Homeland Security (is the purpose of the Defense Department—which failed to...Read More »

Lawrence J. McQuillan | Thursday January 29, 2015 at 5:31 PM PDT | Comments Off on Death Valley? Peter Thiel and Steve Jobs on What Could Kill Silicon Valley

On January 27, legendary entrepreneur Peter Thiel told a packed house at an Independent Institute luncheon, at the Olympic Club in San Francisco, that to blaze new trails ask: “What important truth do very few people agree with me on?” One of mine is that California will not be the epicenter of the tech...Read More »

The past few weeks have been full of travel—between Denver, Atlanta, Louisville, and Washington, D.C., I’ve had more than my fair share of layovers and flight delays. (I was also forced to contemplate what terrible thing I might have done to deserve sitting next to the woman who let out a scream every time...Read More »

William Shughart | Friday October 24, 2014 at 8:30 AM PDT | Comments Off on Airline Deregulation Act of 1978

President Jimmy Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act on October 24, 1978. That law phased out the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) over the next four years, ending five decades of federal regulation of passenger airfares on interstate commercial flights and entry into the airline industry. One of prime movers behind this first legislative initiative...Read More »

It goes by many names: “sustainable development,” “smart growth,” “transit-oriented development,” to name a few. But development projects built under the banner of “sustainability” share the same elements: high-density residential housing and high-intensity commercial space (so-called mixed use) clustered near capital-intensive mass transit lines surrounded by government-owned “open space” and, increasingly, government-imposed “urban growth...Read More »

Lawrence J. McQuillan | Wednesday July 30, 2014 at 4:13 PM PDT | Comments Off on Technology Can Make the Regulatory State Obsolete

The late American inventor and futurist Buckminster Fuller said: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Ridesharing services are trying to do this, but governments stand in the way. In a two-minute Perspective aired today on National Public Radio station KQED...Read More »

On June 18, the Larkspur City Council voted unanimously to kill a high-density “smart-growth” development plan for this community of 12,000 people 16 miles north of San Francisco. The plan called for building 39,500 square feet of office space, 60,000 square feet of hotel space, 77,500 square feet of retail space, and up to...Read More »

Mary Theroux | Monday February 17, 2014 at 12:10 PM PDT | Comments Off on TSA Vet Admits Scanners Are a Joke. And So Are You (to the TSA).

In a recent coming-out piece for the longtime anonymous blogger behind the site “Taking Sense Away”, “Dear America, I Saw You Naked. And yes, we were laughing. Confessions of an ex-TSA agent,” Jason Edward Harrington details his six years as a TSA agent at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. We knew the full-body scanners didn’t work...Read More »

The two strikes by Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) unions during the recent contract negotiations have prompted a legislative campaign to ban strikes by public transit workers in California. John Logan, a professor and director of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University, recently wrote an opinion piece opposing a ban for...Read More »